It won’t wash, but goes on and on

by

02 November 2006

Trevor Barnes despairs at the dominance of the TV soaps

"IT was the best of adaptations. It was the worst of adaptations." I wish
I’d said that, but I have to admit I didn’t. Instead, credit must go to Hardeep
Singh Kohli, of Newsnight’s Late Review, offering his verdict on
Andrew Davies’s screen translation of Bleak House, which is now
entering its final furlong on BBC1.

The best? Well, yes; and, for my money, by miles. It has been a masterpiece
of narrative concision with a freshness of dialogue and a briskness of pace
that have put it in the front rank of contemporary Dickens adaptations. But the
worst? Well, I have to say yes again — and for largely the same reasons.

From the outset it was conceived of as a soap to end all soaps, deliberately
placed after EastEnders to woo those put off by the worthy BBC Dickens
of yore. As such it needed to be reduced to plot alone, pared down to a stylish
whodunit, shorn of its authorial voice, and presented in fast-moving,
bite-sized chunks we could all easily digest. And there was the rub.

Aligning it with that most suspect and all-pervasive of modern dramatic
forms — the soap opera — was a dangerous mistake. There are superficial
similarities, of course. Bleak House itself originally appeared in
serial form and was squeezed in between adverts for cough lozenges and hair
lubricants in exactly the same way as, in 1930s America, "soap operas" appeared
between radio ads for washing powder. Each episode of
The Romance of Helen Trent came with a cliffhanger and left you
wanting more — just like Coronation Street or EastEnders or
Emmerdale or Neighbours or Home and Away
. . .

But the crucial difference is surely that even Dickens’s longest
serialisations came to an end, whereas the TV soap just goes on . . .
and on and on. Never reaching resolution, it delivers (sometimes thrice nightly
and with omnibus editions at weekends) a view of the world that could be
construed as a subtle form of propaganda.

Soaps are hugely influential, attracting viewers in their tens of millions,
and presenting them with values that are reinforced night after night, year
after year. They have now taken it upon themselves to engage with the moral
issues of the day — from drug abuse to rape in marriage, from homophobia to
Evangelical Christian conversion.

All art, of course, engages with the issues of its time, but I wonder
whether I am alone in feeling uneasy at a tacit form of manipulation by a
(doubtless well-meaning) committee of script editors and storyline consultants
who act as unseen arbiters of what issues will or will not make it to the
screen.

All art, it can equally be argued, is a form of manipulation and, yes,
propaganda. Indeed, the late Mary Whitehouse thought the late Dennis Potter a
pernicious propagandist responsible for corrupting an entire generation with
his personal perspective on life and morality. But, in his defence, even the
longest of his creations lasted only 13 weeks, whereas the longevity of the TV
soaps is comparable to the half-life of uranium and, in different social and
political circumstances, just as corrosive.

In the promotional build-up to the magnificent Bleak House, both
adapter and director said that, were Dickens still alive, he would have turned
his attention to soaps as the equivalent medium for reaching a mass popular
audience today. Er . . . up to a point. My guess is that, like many
fine writers who have cut their teeth on soaps, he would soon have abandoned
them as artistically limiting. Plough through the rambling, soap-like
Pickwick Papers and tell me if you don’t long for the resolution of
Oliver Twist.

I can think of another man, however, who would have embraced the soaps with
enthusiasm: that arch-propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who would have spotted
their potential immediately and bent them to his own sinister ends.

No, we do not live in totalitarian times and, no, ITV and BBC producers are
not evil manipulators. But if we did and if they were, protracted and nightly
access to our televisions would prove very useful indeed.